At the heart of Mika Tajima’s multidisciplinary practice, which spans performance, sculpture, painting, and new media installation is a profound inquiry into the conditions of human agency and self-determinacy in built and virtual spaces.

Tracing modernist architecture and design from the Industrial Revolution to the sharing economy, Tajima draws on philosopher Hannah Arendt’s idea of a social space—by which living things make their appearance to probe the visibility of performance, control, and freedom—to investigate how different digital and aesthetic technologies manifest as sensorial and psychic experiences.

Mika Tajima - Backslash Artist 2018

Mika Tajima

Backslash at Cornell Tech funds artists whose practices are nonlinear, unconventional, unexpected, adventurous, intense, surprising, questionable, and primed for engagement with new technologies – all symptoms of being backslash.

Jen Liu

Behind The Scenes

What happens if you are liquidated – financially, socially, politically, subject to climate-induced flooding? Under what conditions is it possible to survive?

The Land at the Bottom of the Sea - Jen Liu - Backslash 2024

The Land at the Bottom of the Sea

Christie Neptune is interested in the spatial-temporal articulations of the body within discursive urban space.

Christie Neptune - Backslash Artist 2021

Christie Neptune

In New Humans, emergent gatherings of synthetic humans rise from the surface of a black ferrofluid pool.

New Humans - Mika Tajima - Backslash 2018

New Humans

Ying's work explores the online worlds and creative interventions of netizens in the ‘Chinternet’ (Chinese Internet) along with the new modes of politics, aesthetics and contemporary consciousness created by the intersections of real and virtual life.

Miao Ying - Backslash Artist 2019

Miao Ying

Matthew Weinstein

I began my Backslash process by asking a question, “what is anti interactivity, or what is the negative space around interactivity?”

The Living End - Matthew Weinstein - Backslash 2017

The Living End

Liu's video, choreographic performance, paintings, and sculpture, starts with research-based fictions.